One-on-One with Bob Melbo:

A Railroad Life From Fred Harvey Houses to the

Portland & Western Railroad

This conversation was with Bob Melbo on August 10th, 2017 and is
property of the Oregon Rail Heritage Foundation. Mr. Melbo is
currently the state rail planner for the Oregon Department of
Transportation Rail and Public Transit Division.

Thank you for joining us Bob. To start, could you give a quick
overview of the professional careers that you have held while
working on the railroads?

Sure. In all I had thirty-three years in the railroad business before

I came to work for the state of Oregon in 2001. My railroad
experience started in 1967 with the Southern Pacific on the
Tucson Division in Arizona. Then I continued to work for the
Southern Pacific for twenty-five years in various management
positions in the operating department. I left the Southern Pacific
in 1993 to go to work for Genesee & Wyoming to basically form the
Willamette & Pacific Railroad which at that time the Genesee &
Wyoming had been the successful bidder on a package of branch
lines that the SP had put up for sale or lease in the Willamette
Valley. They had approached me and asked me if I would come to
work for them and help set up the new company. I thought that
for me personally, it was probably time for a change, so I decided
to go ahead and make that leap from the major railroad to the
small railroad part of the business. So I did that, and we started
the Willamette & Pacific Railroad on February 22nd, 1993. Then
in August of 1995, Genesee & Wyoming was able to lease some
additional branch lines from Southern Pacific, and those were the
branch lines that were closest to the Portland area, which was
about fifty miles in all. In order to do that we had to start a new
railroad, so we created the Portland & Western Railroad.
That railroad, the P&W, took over those lines by mid-August of
1995. Then on October 1st, 1995, we least an additional fifty miles
of branch lines from Burlington Northern. These were branch
lines that were basically in the same area as the SP branches and
in fact some of the BN operations required trackage rights over
the SP branches to get access to various segments of their system.
Therefore, it made sense to pull them all together into a single
shortline operator, so the Portland & Western became a hundred
mile railroad in October of 1995 and then ultimately continue to
grow from there with the acquisition of the Astoria line in July of
1997. Later the Portland & Western purchased the lines and it
was leasing. The initial fifty-mile lease that the Portland &
Western held with the Burlington Northern was converted to a
purchase in 1998, along with the Cornelius Pass branch. So by
that point, Willamette & Pacific and the Portland & Western had
become two pretty good-sized railroads. I continued to work for
them as the first the General Manager and later the President of
both railroads until January of 2001 when I came to work for the
State of Oregon.

When did your interest in the railroads really begin?

Its hard for me to really pinpoint that because I have always been
interested in railroads ever since I can remember. I have often
wondered myself why I liked trains, but in the end I just did. I can
remember as a boy growing up in Los Angeles, we did not live very
close to any rail line. However, there was a Pacific Electric
Railway line that was several blocks away. I can remember that I
once rode my bicycle over that line and I can remember telling my
mother about that and she was somewhat horrified that I had
ridden that far, although I do not think it was really all that far by
adult standards. For me it seemed like a long way, at that young
age! But I always loved trains. Maybe a part of it was when I was
young and at my mother's mother, my grandmother, who lived in
Albuquerque. We would ride the train from Los Angeles over to
Albuquerque to visit her in the summertime. I can still remember
to this day standing in the at the door the last car on the train and
looking out through the window of the door at the track behind the
train and seeing that track receding as we move through Arizona.
It was almost like the train was manufacturing the track. That
was the feeling I always had. I was always fascinated with that
when I was young. So, it was probably that early train travel that
sparked my interest, it certainly did not do anything to dampen
my interest in trains. I vividly remember riding those Pullman
accommodations and some of those things. In fact we even stayed
at some of the Fred Harvey Houses. We did not always ride the
Super Chief or the Chief, which were the premier trains in those
days, we would often take the Grand Canyon or the California
Limited, which at that time had become a secondary train on the
Santa Fe and was no longer a premier train. Those trains
sometimes did not even carry diners, which required them to stop
for meals at the Fred Harvey Houses along the line. So, all of that
was probably rolled into my youth while reinforcing my
interesting trains. I lay it all off to that.

You mentioned the Fred Harvey Houses, could you describe what
those were and what your experiences were with them?

Well, at various stations like in Barstow, California and Williams

and Winslow in Arizona, along with a couple other places too.
Albuquerque had one too. The stations were quite large and they
included restaurants, and the Fred Harvey Company operated
those restaurants. Some years before that company formed some
sort of an alliance with Santa Fe to not only operate the
restaurants but also to provide dining car service. So, the
passenger trains would stop at these restaurants and the
passengers would disembark and have like an hour to eat. That
was in lieu of having a dining car on the train, so they served a
function to feed travelers. They were very clean restaurants, and
had very good food that was reasonably priced. One of the things
that set these Fred Harvey Houses apart from the other railroad
restaurant operators was that they hired young women as
waitresses in their establishments. These were the Harvey Girls,
as they were called. There has been a movie made about them as
well as book written about them. Anyways, these were young
women who came out and worked in the restaurants and they had
to have fairly high moral behavior. They wore these iconic black
and white uniforms. So that was all a part of the Harvey
mystique. Most of the Harvey Houses that I experienced were
between Los Angeles and Albuquerque, and what I remember the
most about them is that they were all done in a Spanish or a
Southwestern motif. They had colorful tile floors and roofs and
nice wooden tables. Mission-style is what I would call it today.
They were overall a very nice experience and there was nothing
that I can recall that was degrading about it at all. It was life and
meals how they should be. So, the Harvey restaurants have gone
down with their own place in history because they served a
purpose in that time.

I would like to move to your personal history. Could you describe

your first job working on the railroad?

Well I started as newspaper reporter in Phoenix for the Arizona

Republic while I was going to school at Arizona State University.
But, I always had this interest in railroads, and I knew that if I
did not hire out on the railroad, or at least try, that I would
probably always regret it as I went through life. I figured that if I
did not at least go try it, then I would never know if I liked the
work or not; that would always be an unanswered question unless
I physically went to work on the railroad. My training at Arizona
State was in Secondary Education. I had a teaching certificate
when I left there to teach history for High School. So anyway, I
badgered the Trainmaster, the Southern Pacifics Trainmaster in
Phoenix, for a couple of years. I'm pretty sure the first year I was
badgering was 1966, but they did not hire anyone that year, so
then I continue to badger them and finally got I got hired by SP is
a brakeman in 1967. April 21st was the day that I made my
date, which is when you make your first paid trip on the railroad
and establishes your seniority date, an important day for an
individual in the railroad business. The student trips that you
make beforehand are on your own. We were paid for those, but
they did not count as service. But, as soon as you made that first
paid trip, that established your seniority date. I worked the extra
board in Phoenix, the extra board out of Tucson, and for a week or
so I worked it out of Yuma. I also went ahead and got a passenger
uniform so I can work the passenger extra board, when there was
work available. I also worked a little as a Brakeman on trains
thirty-nine and forty, which in those days were mail trains. Years
before those trains were actually named passenger trains, I
believe it was either the Imperial or the Argonaut, when it was a
fairly fancy passenger train back in its day. By 1967, it had pretty
much come down to a mail train with a rider coach on the back
end. So I worked that. But I mostly worked the local freight
assignments out of a Phoenix and up in the mining district, which
would have been east of Phoenix. So anyway, in 1968 there was a
copper strike in Arizona. It was a very long strike, and because
Arizona produced about fifty percent of the United States copper
and Southern Pacific hauled all of that, the strike had a severe
impact upon the SP. Quite a few trainmen were laid off, including
myself. It looked like, as the strike went on, that there was not
going to be any further opportunity to work for the SP in Arizona.
It turned out to be an eight month strike before it was over,
during which I took a temporary job as a police officer at Arizona
State University. There in the spring of 1968, I knew that the
Southern Pacific was looking for candidates for their Management
training program in San Francisco, so I applied for that and got
accepted. So, I think it was in either May or June of 1968, we had
to pull up stakes and we moved to Palo Alto. There I worked in
Southern Pacifics general office for their management-training
curriculum. That pretty much marked the end my work with them
out of the field with trains, as a trainman and brakeman.

In general, what a day look like working with the Southern Pacific
as a Brakeman?

Down in Phoenix the pool freight was handled by crews out of

Tucson, so everything in Phoenix was local freight. Despite that
there was still a large amount of activity. There was a Mesa local,
which ran east of Phoenix, and there was a Tempe local that went
from Phoenix down to Tempe and continued down one of the
branches down south of Tempe. There were also two or three other
locals that worked west of Phoenix; one of them was the Dixie
Turn. I can remember working that job and go to work and start
the day in Phoenix with quite a few mechanical refrigerator cars,
and our job was to go out to Buckeye, which is a town west of
Phoenix, and even further west beyond there to a small down that
I think it was called Arlington or Dixie, but out there were a lot of
green produce shed filled with lettuce. We would load the
refrigerated cars with the produce and run them back to Phoenix.
So that was most of the job, making similar runs on the branches
around Phoenix serving the perishable shippers. We would be out
there, already late in the afternoon, and pull all the cars that had
already been spotted and replace them with the empty cars that
we had brought out. I can remember that it had been so hot in the
summertime that you could not touch the grab irons on the
refrigerator cars. It was that hot! You always had to have gloves
on in order to be able to hold onto a car. So, we would gather up all
of these loads and then at the end of the day, in the evening, we
would head back to Phoenix with the perishables. They were then
assembled in Phoenix and assembled into an eastbound freight
train call the A Block, A for Arizona, which was sent down to
Picacho and then onto the mainline to Tucson. That was pretty
much the typical day for us. For me as a brakeman, there were
always two brakemen, and we would work with the conductor. The
brakemen would do all the physical work; flipping switches,
spotting cars, applying hand brakes, lacing up the air hoses, and
overall making sure the cars and brakes were all operating and in
order. Meanwhile, the conductor was responsible for any
paperwork that needed to be done for that day and supervising the
work done by the brakemen. That was pretty much what we did
down there in that part of the world.

For a majority of the 1970s, between your work in California and

once you moved up north to Oregon, your job title that of a
Trainmaster. Can you talk about the duties of that job?

Yeah, so a trainmaster is a lot like a district manager for

operations in a region. My job as a trainmaster was to supervise
the service in in my district. As an example, when I was the
Southern Pacific trainmaster in Portland, which was my first job
here in Oregon, I had a couple of local freights that worked close
to Portland that I was directly responsible for overseeing. I had a
Clackamas switcher that did the local work at the Clackamas area
and an Oregon City switcher that could only be worked at night.
This was because the track that you needed to use to serve the
mill ran down the middle of Main Street in downtown Oregon
City, so it was not prudent to try to switch that mill during the
daytime with all of the automobile traffic. So that switch work was
started around 10 oclock at night and was finished well after
midnight. Then I also oversaw a Canby local that worked out of
Brooklyn Yard that run south to the Canby area. There was
another local that ran out of Woodburn that run down to Stayton
and a train we called the Turner Turn which ran south from
Brooklyn Yard at night to Salem and then continued down to
Turner to serve a lumber company. Overall there was good deal of
more mainline work than there is today, as there were quite a few
industries still located along the SP mainline as well as along the
branches of the valley. The job of trainmaster was to ensure that
all of that freight got covered by these local assignments, but with
the minimal amount of trains as possible. I was responsible for the
expense of those operations, and any overtime that was made. I
was also responsible for the scheduling; we switched the
customers at the times that they preferred to be serviced, but also
at a time that made it possible to pick up all these cars in time so
they could be brought back to the appropriate yard or pick-up
point to be added to mainline trains to get to where they were
going. In a way it was like running the postal service. You have
trucks running around and picking up mail all over town and
bringing it back to the central post office to get sorted out and
dispatched to common destinations. That is kind of what railroads
do. The cargo is rounded up at a sorting facility or a rail yard and
grouped for common destinations until they are eventually loaded
onto outbound trains. So the trainmaster was responsible for
setting up the service, making sure it was being economically
performed with the minimal amount of local freight, and also
responsible for rules compliance. Much like the drivers manual
that all car owners have, or ought to have, the railroad has a
similar rulebook that gives the rules of the road. Therefore, I had
to enforce that rule compliance and ensure that all the employees
working the railroad were working in conformance with the
operating rules. Overall it was an interesting job because I got to
be involved day in and day out with the scheduling of these locals.
Often time during the holiday season, like over Thanksgiving
weekend, we would often abolish some of the local assignments in
order to save money because the way the grievance worked on the
railroad was that often times the employees were paid the holiday
pay if they did not work. They at least got the straight day, and if
they worked they got time and a half plus the straight day job.
Sometimes if you thought you could get by with less service you
would abolish these jobs then reestablish them after the holidays.
So, the trainmaster job was to figure all that out and try to save
the company some money when there were opportunities to do
that. Of course whenever you had a recession, which we had
several times during my years here in Oregon, you have to make
cutbacks and then redeploy your assets to try to continue to cover
all the bases on service but to do it with fewer people. That was
always a hard struggle. But, overall, the trainmaster jobs are
basically district managers for service and operations of a
railroad.

During the 1980s you had the job of Assistant Division

Superintendent of the Oregon Division of the Southern Pacific. Do
you think that job helped you see the larger and overarching
railroad landscape in Oregon compared to the more local activity
that you oversaw while trainmaster in Portland?

Definitely! As an Assistant Superintendent all the Trainmasters

reported to me, so I was pretty familiar with all of their
operations. Those days we were talking about a division the
Oregon Division of the SP extended down to Dunsmuir, California,
so we had a lot of locals in places like Roseburg, Medford, Klamath
Falls, Eugene, and of course the Willamette Valley with all the
locals up on the west side. So there was a lot of activity! I mean we
had like fifteen hundred employees on the SP Oregon Division.
Through this job I got to be intimately familiar with all operations
throughout the division because of working with the various
trainmasters that were out across the state. The other thing the
job did was work with connecting carriers; back in those days the
SPs principal connecting carrier was the Burlington Northern.
The Union Pacific was viewed more as a competitor, compared to
the BN. We had some very cooperative relations with the
Burlington Northern. We were passing trains through Portland
that originated on the BN and we were able to move right through
Portland to Eugene for further processing, and visa versa, we were
operating trains up from Eugene and directly to the BN and one of
their yards. Working with those connecting carriers definitely
gave me a wider view of the rail system beyond what I had while
working in a specific district as a trainmaster. The principal
connection carrier was the Burlington Northern, and when I came
to Oregon in 1972, the BN had been formed two years prior in
1970; so they were still relatively new. We still had connections
with the Union Pacific, but again, that was more of a competitive
situation. The BN was more of a north-south operation whereas
the UP was both north-south and east-west, but so were we at the
Southern Pacific. We did some things with the UP in Ogden, but I
was so far removed from that that I did not really deal with much
of that here, other than when I was in Eugene as the Terminal
Superintendent as we built trains that went to the UP in Ogden.
We also built trains down there that went out to the Denver, Rio
Grande & Western as well. But anyway, you do get a much more
global view when you work at the Superintendent or Assistant
Superintendent level.

In 1992, the Southern Pacific looked to put most of the Western

Oregon branch line network out for bid. What role did you have in
that process?

Well I did not really have a role with actually putting together the
bid packages. That was done by some people in San Francisco,
which was where the Southern Pacific headquarters was located.
So there were some branch line rationalization people there that
were putting together what they thought would be attractive bid
packages for the shortline community to look at and bid on. But by
that time I was the Superintendent of the SP Oregon Division and
then after we had another reorganization I became Manager of
field operations in Portland, reporting directly to the General
Manager in Roseville. It was sort of like still being a
Superintendent, but it just lacked that title. Well anyway, during
that time when those branch line packages were being offered, my
job was to host the shortline companies that were looking at the
branches. We had several companies were interested in those
lines. When they came up to actually physically take those
companies to look, my job was to put them in a high rail car and
tour the lines with them. This took several days, or at least a
couple days anyway, because generally we did not mix ne
shortline company with the representatives of another shortline
company; so there were separate trips. So I made several trips
over the network with those folks; talking about and showing
them the strengths and weaknesses of each line out there.

When the Willamette & Pacific Railroad was formed, you were
asked to leave the Southern Pacific and take on a big role in
starting the new railroad. Could you discuss the details of that
transition for you? Also, when you start a new shortline railroad
operation, where does that process start?

That was really interesting! When they approached me about

going to work for them, I believe it was December of 1992,
basically they (Genesee & Wyoming) wanted me to form the new
company that would eventually become the Willamette & Pacific
and hire all the people that we would need. After I thought about
it and agreed that I would do it, I went to work for them on
January 11th, 1992. So, I had left the Southern Pacific and joined
Genesee & Wyoming. Genesee & Wyoming had already been
started by then, operating some other shortlines. They had a guy
named Forrest Beck, who was working with, who had already put
together a tentative business plan for the railroad, which they did
not have a name for yet. They had figured that they would
probably need around fifty-eight people to operate this 185-mile
network. There was going to have to be so many trainmen,
engineers, brakemen, and maintenance people and so on. So I had
a basic operating plan to follow, but my first job was then to
interview possible employees who might be interested in coming to
work for us. Of course the first obstacle that you have doing this
on with a shortline is that they cannot pay the same as the larger
railroad companies. Therefore, if you are trying to recruit
somebody who is already working for a railroad, you are probably
trying to recruit somebody who is going to come work for you for
less money. That was a definite disincentive. I was very fortunate
in that I had, because of my years up here, a good rapport with a
lot of SP people. There were a lot of SP employees who knew that
once these branch lines were leased out, that they were probably
going to lose their jobs; because the SP would not need as many
people to run those lines. So there was a good chance that lot of
people were going to be furloughed. There were some people who
were really interested, and they were basically coming with the
line that was going to be spun off. I was really lucky, in many
respects, because I had a lot of people who basically were willing
to follow me over to the branch lines and come to work for the new
company. Another of the first things I had to do was actually pick
the name for the company. I came up with the name of Willamette
and Pacific. When I filed with the Secretary of State, here in
Salem, I actually screwed up. I was not aware of the Genesee &
Wyoming way of doing things, so when I filed the name it was
Willamette and Pacific Railroad, with the and all spelled out. I
quickly found out that with Genesee & Wyoming, all of the
railroads use the ampersand. I had to go all the way back and re-
file the railroad and Willamette & Pacific Railroad. That was one
of the specific things that the chairman of the Genesee &
Wyoming was really keen on. All of the company's shortline
railroads used the ampersand: Genesee & Wyoming, Buffalo &
Pittsburg, Willamette & Pacific, and Louisiana & Delta. They
were all ampersands. Anyway, thats a lesson you learn and never
forget. When we later started the Portland & Western, I
remembered the ampersand! So, I was able to recruit just about
everybody that we needed, and almost everybody that I hired was
the off of the Southern Pacific. I got a just a few people who did
not come from SP. I think there were two or three people off the
street and one or two people from other railroads. I thought we
were going to launch the W&P on March 1st, but somebody with
the SP got a little bit irritated over how much time it was taking
Genesee & Wyoming to get this done. They actually told Genesee
& Wyoming that they were going to pull a deal if the railroad was
not up and going by February, so we had to accelerate the start up
time to February 22nd. I still remember that first day. We were
down there at the Albany yard, which was the new headquarters
for the Willamette & Pacific. We had arranged to lease, I think,
about twenty SP engines for our start-up power. It is snow that
day, so there was there was snow on the ground was cold. I can
remember how sobering it was standing there at the Albany
station; all the maintenance-of-way guys were in there. Of course
we had no tools for them to work with yet. So here are all of these
maintenance-of-way guys standing around, who are on the
payroll, but they have absolutely nothing to work with. The first
train was headed out towards the Toledo paper mill. So that was
our first train, which was operator with our first crew. I can still
remember to this day that I was looking out the window and
thinking about whether or not I had made the right decision to
leave the Southern Pacific because there was a stark realization
that everyone's livelihood in that room, including my own,
depended on our ability to move those car and that freight that
was out there. There was so many nuts and bolts of actually
moving all that freight, running those trains, fixing that track,
and everything else that was going to make the payroll. And it
was actually very frightening! All the sudden it was really on us.
We were no longer working for this big corporation that was the
Southern Pacific. We are all a part of this little company now, and
if it sinks, so do we. It was kind of scary, it really was. I had never
really ever had that kind of experience before, so it was sobering, a
very sobering day.

You talked about how it was nerve racking to leave the safety of
working for the much larger Southern Pacific. However, would you
say that making the transition to the smaller Willamette & Pacific
and Portland & Western allowed you to take more pride and find
more happiness in your work?

Oh Yeah! Absolutely, without question. The eight years that I was

with the Willamette & Pacific and Portland & Western were the
best eight years of my life in terms of working. It was the most
fun. I mean in the last to the fifteen years or so that I had worked
with the Southern Pacific, the railroad was in perpetual crisis. We
continually had to cut back. They were closing stations and
reducing service. In some cases, like on Branch lines, we went
from daily service to thrice-weekly service. We were cutting back
and not maintaining the lines the way we should have. Capital
programs were being cut because the earnings of the company
were not sufficient to sustain them. The capital money the SP did
have was being put towards the mainlines. Of course, there was
also the ill-fitted merger with the Santa Fe in the mid-eighties.
That really sucked away a lot of money from SP. There had been
some long range plans made with the Santa Fe that went up in
smoke when the Interstate Commerce Commission turn that
merger down. So we had really have been suffering for quite a
long time in terms of really doing the kind of things that a
corporation needs to do to renew itself and continue to be
competitive. Coming out of that environment, which had just been
this continual long slide downhill, it was so refreshing to be on the
upward end of the curve. Here we had this new company; we going
out to the customers, and instead of saying Sorry we have to cut
back your service, it was more like What can we do to make your
service better? We were out there knocking on the doors and
kicking rocks around on the field with the farmers and so on. It
was building business up again, a complete reversal what we had
been doing with the SP. Everything was more on a positive note.
And we were very successful getting back a lot of the business that
the SP had lost over the years through the agency closings and
reduction to service. It was just done by showing some interest,
going out and asking people what they needed and to show them
how we could save them some money over other transportation
like trucks. We quickly begin to rebuild a business. Our car
loadings increased year after year as a result of that. So that was
one of the fun aspects. The other fun aspect of working for the
W&P and P&W was after getting out of the union environment
with organized labor, we had an organizations with a shortline at
the time, and so we did not have any of these confining union
agreements where This is my work, and that is your work. That
meant that we could each have a number of different jobs on the
railroad, including myself. I was certified as a locomotive
engineer, and I often went out to relieve locomotive engineers. For
instance, a lot of times the engineer of the local that ran out of
Corvallis, when he needed to go to the doctor or dentist, I went
over and relieved him, as general manager! There were times for
quite a long time when on Sundays I would operate the Eugene
hauler, which ran from Albany down to Eugene and back. That
was a seven-day a week train that we operated, but we set out our
working schedules so that people could have at least two days off a
week. So, I figured myself into the relief program for that job! It
was just a lot of fun. I mean one day you were out soliciting
business, the next day you might be operating the train, and the
third day you might be attending a meeting with a city official. It
was the variety and ability to just to do a lot of different things
that made my time with the W&P and P&W so rewarding.

When the Willamette & Pacific and Portland & Western acquired
the westside branch lines, what kind of track conditions did you
guys inherit?

On the Southern Pacific side of the house, with exception of the

Toledo line, which was in reasonably good shape, just about
everything else that we got was just accept status. The
federation classifications rank track conditions from one through
nine. Class One track is good for 10 MPH for freight and 15 MPH
for passenger. Class Two is good for 25 freight and 30 passenger.
Class Three allows for 30 MPH and 60 MPH, respectively, but
accepted track is actually a subclass of Class One. That track is
only good for 10 MPH freight, and does not allow passenger
service, so that track is the lowest of the low! So we actually
inherited a lot of accepted track. On the westside branch between
Corvallis and Independence, we had pretty good railroad. It was
actually Class Two if not Class Three, because the SP in later
years had actually re-laid that with ribbon rail. North of
Independence, we were looking at accepted track with 75-pound
rail all the way up to McMinnville. The same was true for the
Willamina branch. Between McMinnville and Cook, which was
more less the Newberg branch, there was not anything lighter
than 90-pound rail with very poor tie condition. For the most part,
that line was 10 MPH. One of the conditions that we had in our
lease with SP was that we had to replace the rail on the line
between Independence and McMinnville. We had an obligation to
relay with heavier rail, and we ultimately did do that. We also had
to put some ties in out there. We wound up buying second-hand
ties that were coming off of the abandonment of the Oregon
Eastern line, which is Union Pacific line between Burns and
Ontario. And then we ended up getting some ribbon rail off of the
Visalia Electric abandonment in California. It was not ribbon rail
when we bought it, it was stick rail, but we had it welded and had
it brought up to be used on the westside. Then we bought several
miles of 100-pound rail from the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific.
We actually had a rail welding plant for a while in Independence,
where we welding the rail and load ribbon rail trains and took
them out to unload it. So we did replace all the rail between
Independence and McMinnville, with the heavier, continuous
welded rail. We did tie programs of the Toledo line as well,
bringing that track up to Class Two, which was good enough. 25
MPH does not sound like much, but for operating a branch line
network, it is sufficient. You do not need to be running 40 MPH
out there because for the most part you are not going very far and
usually there are frequent stops. So 25 MPH is perfectly good and
is basically two and a half times faster than Class One track,
which is an important difference. So we gradually worked to
improve the track as best we could. Ultimately, after I left
Genesee & Wyoming, W&P was able to relay the Willamina
branch as well, which they did with the help of some state and
federal grants. On the Burlington Northern branches, the Oregon
Electric line was in pretty good shape. The line through North
Plains, which is the United Railways District, that was essentially
accepted track, as was the Forest Grove branch. We did a tie
program on United Railways, but that line still needs to have the
rail replaced in order for it to become something better than 10
MPH. It is still 10 MPH to this day. The Forest Grove line is down
to 5 MPH I believe. It has very light rail and has so little traffic
out there. I do not think that they had even operated it in the last
two years. There is a good chance that the P&W will abandon that
line soon. We were not able to do much in terms of track
maintenance on the BN lease, but there was not much to do really.
Like I said, the Oregon Electric was in pretty good shape. For the
other branches, we did not have the volume of traffic on those
lines that would justify the kind of money needed to fix them up.
But, we did do when we were obligated to do under the SP lease.

During your years with the W&P and P&W, the SP 4449 and
SP&S 700, which are both housed at the Oregon Rail Heritage
Center, both made runs on the westside branch lines. What do you
remember about those runs and the conditions they were allowed
on the company's lines?

In the early days of the W&P and P&W, we had a lot of autonomy
as the regional management of those companies. That slowly
changed as Genesee & Wyoming became bigger and bigger over
time, by that I mean as they acquired more railroads. They also
begin to acquire the mindset of the larger railroad companies to
centralize much more than they had, including the centralization
of operating that began to take more of them decision-making
away from the regional managers of the shortlines and
concentrating it in company headquarters. Part of the reason that
began to happen was because initially Genesee & Wyoming was a
privately held company; the stock was not publicly traded. Then
the company, after I had been there three or four years, the
company went public. As a result, it became very important from
then on that the company made its earnings expectations and
what the Wall Street writers, of the newspapers and the blogs
that cover what people say about you in there. It became all about
making the numbers, particularly the quarterly. When Genesee &
Wyoming was privately held, this was less important, and what
was more important was the annual numbers. Well, it completely
changed with the focus on quarterly numbers, which led to more
and more control being taken away from the subsidiaries and
vested in the corporate headquarters. But in the early years,
because of the autonomy, I could make the decision to the SP 4449
or SP&S 700 come out and operate on the property and set the
conditions. We did not really ask for much to let them on our lines,
we were just thrilled by the notoriety and the publicity that those
runs would generally generate. I can remember one time with the
4449; they painted the locomotives tender to say Willamette &
Pacific on one side and Portland & Western on the other, which
was a part of the publicity. That locomotive cannot go anywhere
without drawing a crowd. So, when the 4449 was operating down
the westside branches, like operating on 2nd Street in
Independence as an example, it always drew a lot of folks and
gave us a lot of good feelings in the communities where our lines
ran through. Therefore, I always felt that it was a good thing to
do, just to help publicize the railroad in a time when more focus
was on automobiles or planes. Overtime, about the time that I left
Genesee & Wyoming in the early 2000s, it was almost impossible
to let those steam engines on the property without clearing it with
the folks back east. The last time that I can remember that the
4449 operated on the lines was when it went to and from the
Sherwood for their antique car Cruise-in event for several years in
a row. Those trips were pretty easy to justified, again because of
the involvement with the community and the publicity for us. It is
hard to quantify that, putting a dollar and cents value on it, but it
is nevertheless valuable. So anyway, it was fairly easy for us to
allow runs like that on the lines in the early days of the Genesee
& Wyoming operation.

Your current position with the Oregon Department of

Transportation is that of State Rail Planner. What kind of duties
does that job hold?

Well first of all, that title is probably not very descriptive of what I
actually do. We do not really plan railroads. All the railroads that
we have are already here. In fact, it is more about trying to
preserve the railroads we do have in Oregon because we have been
steadily losing rail miles in this state. I am afraid that going
forward we will continue to lose line segments here; it is almost an
unstoppable thing in some cases. But I have several duties. One is
that I work with the Amtrak passenger program that the State of
Oregon supports; two round-trip Amtrak Cascades passenger
trains that run between Portland and Eugene. So we got into the
business in 1994 and we are still in the passenger business. In
fact, in 2013, we took delivery of two new passenger trains that
the State owns, the Talgo trainsets of Mt. Jefferson and Mt.
Bachelor that are currently operating on the Cascades service.
That purchase really cemented our relationship with the State of
Washington, which is the other sponsor of the Amtrak Cascades.
So I have quite a bit of work to do with that passenger service.
Then I also try to stay in contact with all of the freight railroads.
We have the two major carriers in Oregon, the Union Pacific and
BNSF, and then we have twenty-one shortlines in the State as
well. I try to stay on top of what they are doing and how they are
doing. They all submit an annual report to us on their gross
revenue and also on their carloads that they handle; the two of
those make a pretty good barometer on how things are going with
a particular railroad. I take that information and slice it and dice
it in several different ways to keep my pulse on the industry and
my boss through the upper echelon of ODOT informed of the
status of the rail industry. So I keep and pass along a good deal of
information in that regard. Over the last about the last ten years
we had a lot of grant programs, mainly through Connect Oregon.
Before that we had the Shortline Infrastructure Grant Program
and we had a Rail Industry Spur Grant Program, which had eight
million dollars in it. So, over the years we have had a lot of grants
that have been put out there for rail projects. I have been fairly
heavily involved in managing those grants, not only in the process
of reviewing them and then helping them to be evaluated and
selected, but also managing the actual grant when the project is
underway. That includes paying the bills as they come in and
dispersing grants funds to various places as they come in.
However, one of my favorite things about this job is that i get to
look over the shoulder of all the railroads! So I get to poke around
in their business a little bit. I am not just tied to one railroad
anymore, now I get to mess around with all of them! And I like
that. I am also the Resident Historian here at ODOT. You would
be surprised how many times during the year that some historic
question will come up about some rail line or some piece of
railroad right of way or what is the story on this or that and so on.
Most of the time, I am able to provide that answer.
What are some of the methods you have at the Oregon Department
of Transportation for preserving railroad history?

Well the State of Oregon has historically had the jurisdiction over
all of the public rail crossings, originally in the hands of the Public
Utility Commission. That oversight was later transferred by the
State Legislature to the Department of Transportation in the mid-
1990s, before I came to work here. Fortunately, all of that
information that had been in the files for every crossing came over
with that jurisdiction. Most of that information has been scanned
now and is in electronic files so it could be pulled out of there as
needed. You can go back and look, but in some cases these
crossings go all the way back to 1913 or whenever. This is
information that would not necessarily still exist today in a lot of
the State Department's because there are rules about how long
you can archive stuff. It is important of course to be able to go
back and see who is responsible for decisions or changes that were
made. The crossings tend to always live on, because when you
create a crossing it is like creating this being, and what happens
to it is a part of its history as time moves forward. So we are not
really able to extinguish those records, and therefore we maintain
a lot of those records regarding crossings. Beyond that, we have a
lot of right-of-way maps for all the railroad right-of-ways
throughout the State of Oregon that we got from the Department
of Revenue. The Department of Revenue had them because of the
assessment; railroads are centrally assessed for taxation purposes,
not assessed by the county assessor like what would happen with
my property and my home. But the railroad is assessed centrally
by the state because it is a much more complicated assessment
process. So anyway, the Department of Revenue has not only
given us the paper copies of all of the right-of-way maps, but they
have also had them scanned and they gave us electronic files as
well. I have actually been going through these recently, in fact I
was working on them this morning, looking at them and trying to
organize them better. Right now they are organized just horribly!
But it is clear to me that this one set of maps that I am looking at,
and when I am talking about these maps I mean they are as long
as a table or maybe thirty inches wide and six feet long, each map
only represent like four miles of railroad. So they got a lot of
detail! Anyway, a lot of these maps that I have been looking at,
the most recent entry on them is like 1929, so they actually go way
back. They have a lot of historic information on them, including
the origin all of the property that comprise of a railroad, with the
property broken up into smaller parcels with notes on there about
who the grantor was and who the grantee was. These were not the
bigger companies that we know like the Southern Pacific or the
Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway; these were the
predecessors like the Oregon Western or the Oregon Electric or
something like that. They also give how that property was
transferred; whether it was through a bargain, or a quitclaim
deed, or a franchise like on a city street, or in a condemnation to
the court. Anyway, so they have all that information on there too.
It really has a very good history on how the railroad right-of-ways
were put together. And of course the maps show you all of the
structures like bridges and tunnel as well. So we have all of those,
and I have been working to save them for future historians.
Another thing I activity do to preserve Oregon railroad history is I
maintain files on all of the extinct and abandoned railroads. This
is a duty that I probably do not need to do, and maybe somebody
else in this position might not do that, but I do it because I am
interested in the history and want to see that it is taken care of. I
have a file folder with a bit information for each of the abandoned
railroads. An example was the California and Oregon Coast
Railroad, which operated out of Grants Pass. I also have a file on
the Carlton and Coast Railroad, which operated from Carlton to
Tillamook Gate. So I have a lot of information on railroads that
are extinct today, but the history is available to me. I try to keep it
all together, that is important. I do think that we here at ODOT
are doing quite a bit to track the history of the railroads in
Oregon. Have we lost stuff? Sure. I am certain that many files
that once existed here have found their way into the blue recycling
barrels, which is a crying shame. There were bunches of old
photographs that I remember seeing several years ago. These
were small, brownie like photographs, of grade separation
structures such as bridges over roads and highways that ODOT
had. There were also some crossing files with hand-drawn maps of
how the trackage laid and so on. Unfortunately, one of the
managers here got to cleaning house one day, and a lot of that
stuff got tossed out. That is a real shame. Anyways, I think that
we are do a good job to preserve as much of the history as we
possibly can.

What is the current state of the shortline railroads in Oregon in

2017?

One of the things that we are facing is that there is a slow, but
steady, deterioration of business on the shortlines in Oregon. In
other words, the shortlines are not able to replace the lost revenue
when an industry shuts down. Case in point, the paper mill in
Newberg. Shut down. That paper mill was a big chunk of the
Willamette & Pacific book of business back when the W&P was
created. Back then it was the Smurfit company, which made
newsprint, and sent a large amount of paper down south to the
Los Angeles Times. But anyway, there is nothing in Newberg that
replaces that mill as a traffic generator. That is probably the
biggest challenge that we face as a state and the rail industry
faces generally, particularly the shortlines. There is this process of
industrial evolution going on where industries begin life and they
mature but they have this adulthood where they are very
productive and they do well; but ultimately if they do not
modernize by investing in new equipment all that stuff, then
eventually they end up becoming elderly and they fold up and
close. So, if you are a railroad and you serve that industry, you
need to be bringing new customers on as time moves forward
because of this attrition. They must bring on new customers to
replace the ones that fall off. And that is not what is happening
with the Oregon shortlines. We are not seeing these new
industries locate themselves on these branch lines enough so to
balance off the dying ones. That is really concerning. As an
example: Toledo. They have the big Georgia and Pacific paper mill
over there. If that mill ever closes up, which inevitably it will one
of these days, that is going to be the end of the Toledo branch line.
There is nothing else over there besides a small lumber mill that
provides a few car loads, but that is not going to justified a
railroad line. When that paper mill is gone, there is going to be
hell to pay to save that line and keep it from being abandoned.
There will not be any justification to have that track. Railroads
thrive on volume, and you got to have volume. If you are not
hauling a lot of stuff, it just will not pay for itself. So that is
probably the most serious thing that the railroad industry faces in
Oregon. We have already seen paper mills in Newberg, St. Helens,
and Millersburg, which was there from 1955 to 2009. That outfit
was actually the largest taxpayer in Linn County with over two
hundred family wage jobs. So we continue to see this die off of
mills; another one was the mill along the falls in Oregon City, that
was a Smurfit newsprint mill and it is gone. We are seeing that
happened and railroads are not bringing anything online that
basically can fill in for that loss. The major carriers like BNSF and
UP, they can probably survive it, but the shortlines are in a
different situation. That to me is alarming. And I do not have the
solution for it. I do think that the shortlines need to do more about
drumming up business for themselves and increase their
marketing. The W&P and P&W have been decent with that, but
the shortline railroads on the east side of the Willamette Valley
such as the Albany and Eastern and the Willamette Valley
Railway need to do better or they will eventually run out of
customers. You cannot depend on the same old same old forever.
That is not the way life works.

Last question. Personally, what would he say is the proudest

achievement of your long railroad career?

Well I think it is what we have seen go on for the Willamette &

Pacific and the Portland & Western. When we formed the
Willamette & Pacific, and then when we later formed the Portland
& Western in 1995, I pretty much figured that the ultimate build
out of those companies would be to incorporate all of the branch
lines in the Willamette Valley. Currently in 2017, the P&W is
pretty much there. What the P&W does not have is the Albany
and Eastern and the Willamette Valley Railway, both of these are
on the eastern side of the Willamette Valley. I felt certain that if
we, Genesee & Wyoming, played our cards right back when I was
working for them, that we could eventually gather up all of the
branch lines west of I-5. And that had occurred! The only one that
they had been unable to get was the Port of Tillamook Bay
Railroad, but that was knocked out by the massive storm in
December of 2007. That railroad is kind of a done deal. That is
history. But everything else on the westside now falls under the
W&P and P&W, and I feel good about that. Some of that goal was
finished after I left, but the blueprint was already there. We had
always figured that it could happen, and it did. The final couple
pieces fell into place after I left the company. Now what else
happened was that the Southern Pacific, back in 1993, put up the
Siskiyou line and the Coos Bay line both up for sale or lease.
Genesee & Wyoming, and by this time the W&P had already been
started, was interested and I helped put together a bid to lease the
Siskiyou line and Coos Bay line. And so we were going to start the
Oregon & California Railroad! That was the name I picked. I
thought the name would be hugely appropriate since that is what
the line used to be. Well, we actually got it, but then the SP get
cold feet. They were afraid that because we already have of a
Willamette & Pacific and we would be touching the Oregon &
California in Eugene, they were afraid that the unions were going
to figure out a way to make that work in court and trigger too
many labor protection issues which then the SP would have to pay
a lot of these labor folks who were otherwise had lost their jobs
because of these spin-offs. So they backed out of that deal. They
ended up selling the package to RailTex. But anyway, what ended
up happening was three years ago Genesee & Wyoming ended up
acquiring RailTex. Therefore, Genesee & Wyoming now has the
Siskiyou line. However they do not have the Coos Bay line, which
was originally a part of that deal, is now owned by the Port of
Coos Bay. RailTex, which became RailAmerica, got greedy and
shut the line down in 2007 I believe and I tried to abandon the
line. That led to the Port of Coos Bay filing a feeder line
acquisition case with the Surface Transportation Board, and they
acquired the line and it has survived to this day. Anyway, at least
the Siskiyou line is now Genesee & Wyoming property, only about
a decade after their first attempt to acquire the line. Overall, I
have a lot of pride in the two Genesee & Wyoming companies and
what they have become. They started off almost like a child, I had
to work hard to get the Willamette & Pacific up and running,
which required a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. I just feel really
good inside that it has become as successful as it is today. In 2000,
we made the decision to for the public face for both the Willamette
& Pacific and the Portland & Western to be the P&W. Basically
we said that we were going to operate under the P&W banner and
the W&P identity is going to be subjugated to the P&W. Let me be
clear, the two railroads are not merged and are separate
companies. We get a report every year from both the W&P and
P&W, but in the publics eye it is like it is one railroad. Thats the
way that they operate it, but they have never actually merged
those companies. Anyways, the Portland & Western Railroad is
my shining moment, or my signature achievement.

This Conversation was with Bob Melbo on August 10, 2017. This
document is property of the Oregon Rail Heritage Foundation.